Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic … Read more
Notes From the Borderland Larry O’Hara now has his own journal, Notes from the Borderland, the first issue of which appeared in November last year. Like his previous pamphlets, this is full of fascinating information on the far right – the guts of the lead article on a charity scam being run in the UK … Read more
Ronald McIntosh London: Politico’s, 2006 Some of us on the wrong side of 40 will have experienced a certain sinking feeling on our first encounter with this book, not least because of the misleading subtitle: ‘Politics, trade union power and economic failure in the 1970s’. All the signs suggest a reworking of the sort … Read more
Someone pointed out to me that Lobster 42 ranged from Gladstone to UFOs, a spread probably unique today. But this range has a downside: things get picked up and then sidelined. One such area is the field bounded on one side by what is known as mind control and on the other by non-lethal technologies. … Read more
Where’s Ware? John Ware is one of the leading British TV journalists of our age. He has worked for World in Action and Panorama and is held in very high regard by his colleagues. Having produced a number of documentaries on the war in Northern Ireland he is now seen as an expert on the … Read more
Tom Nairn London: Verso, 2002, hb £13 I really like Tom Nairn. He is wonderful writer and this is a delight. If you’ve read Nairn all you need to know is that this is more of the same. But if you haven’t I’m not sure how to convey what he is about. This is … Read more
From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 Mark Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) Dead Men Don’t Eat Lunch Geoffrey Gilson (self-published) Beyond Bullets Jules Boykoff’s AK Press, 2007: <www.akuk.com> Briefly Mark Garnett’s From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience since 1975 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007) has had some fairly sniffy reviews but I … Read more
The Imperial War Museum book of Modern Warfare: British and Commonwealth Forces at War 1945-2000 Edited by Major General Julian Thompson London: Pan Books, 2003, £8.99 This is the paperback edition of the book published by Sidgwick and Jackson a year ago. It contains 15 essays on conflicts that have involved British armed forces … Read more
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
